Former England captain David Beckham is being lined up to promote Chinese football, state media said on Friday, but fans say rebuilding the sport’s shattered image may be too big a challenge even for him.

Singapore has long cultivated a reputation as a clean, safe and regimented place to live and do business in a turbulent region, but the apparently major role of Singaporeans in a global soccer match-fixing scandal shows a seamy underside often out of view.

In just the latest indication that Singapore is at the heart of a global match-fixing empire, European police said they had smashed a network rigging hundreds of games, including in the Uefa Champions League and World Cup qualifiers.

There is no bigger spectator sport in China than soccer, but nor is there a national game more scorned. Blighted by ineptitude and corruption, it is the reference point by which failure is measured. However, the passion of fans is driving change.

Four mainland soccer referees were yesterday jailed for between 3 1/2 and seven years for their roles in fixing matches, in the first important verdict following a crackdown on soccer-related corruption, state media reported.

The man who used to head the mainland's soccer referees went on trial for corruption along with a soccer club boss yesterday, kicking off a series of trials that is expected to feature more than 60 officials and businessmen.

It's an all-too-familiar story in Asian soccer: the foreign import who never quite made it in his own country becomes a superstar in an exotic, faraway location before being sucked into a world of sex, drugs and corruption.

It is some 14 months now since the Jockey Club's executive director of racing, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, described betting exchanges as the 'biggest threat to racing's integrity' worldwide and called on all racing jurisdictions to lobby governments for the banning of betting exchange operations on racing.